


Life at the Heart

by Selenay



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-26
Updated: 2008-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 17:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selenay/pseuds/Selenay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With thirty hours to kill before they arrived in Rome, Donna had two choices. She could sit in her room and read, except she had no books, or she could explore the TARDIS. Well, which would you choose?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life at the Heart

The room that the Doctor showed Donna to, carrying her bags with only a little complaint, was the first door along a corridor that led off the control room. There was no hesitation, no checking to be sure that it was unused; he just pushed the door open with a foot and dumped all her bags in the middle of the room.

"We should arrive in about thirty hours," the Doctor said with a grin.

"Arrive where?" Donna asked.

The grin widened. "It wouldn't be a surprise if I told you."

With that he ducked out of the room only to reappear a moment later. "Feel free to explore, but try not to get lost."

He withdrew from the room and almost immediately popped his round the door again. "And Donna, if a door is locked there's usually a good reason even if I can't remember it."

Then he was gone again. Donna waited a minute but the Doctor stayed gone, no more reappearances with further instructions so she assumed that she would have to find out everything else for herself.

She half expected the room he had given her to be filled with other people's stuff - perhaps belonging the mysterious Martha or Rose - but it wasn't. In fact, if she had designed a bedroom for herself then this was almost exactly what she would have designed. The walls held hints of odd roundels like the ones in the control room and there were a few more pot plants than she usually bothered with. The whites and blues and greens were exactly her thing, though, and there was a beautiful big bed that looked much more comfortable than the single bed with a rock-hard mattress she had been living on at her mum's. The room could easily have contained her old bedroom plus her mum's kitchen with space left over and a quick check of a door half hidden behind a drape revealed the kind of large en-suite that she had seen on the telly in five star hotels and secretly coveted for years. There was even a window opposite the door with a disconcertingly real view of an ocean even though that was completely impossible.

She wondered what they were actually travelling through and what it looked like, and then dismissed the thought because she would never dare to ask the Doctor. His answer would probably just give her a terrible headache and she was afraid that she would never be able to walk around the TARDIS without clinging to walls if she actually knew what it was doing.

There was enough wardrobe and drawer space for all her clothes and Donna spend a productive hour unpacking and arranging everything to her liking. A few bits of furniture needed moving - who thought a chair would be good over there? - and then the room was ready.

Donna sat down on the chair that now sat in a corner with a good view of the window and waited. Thirty hours. A day and a half. How did other people spend that long in a TARDIS? She had never been much good at waiting. Donna liked to be doing things, moving forwards, getting somewhere.

She sat for a while. There was no TV or DVD player in the room, nothing that even remotely resembled movie-playing apparatus. No Internet, obviously. She hadn't thought to bring any books, not that she had been a big reader before except for trashy novels when she was on holiday and anyway lately all her reading time had been spent chasing down rumours on the Internet. Donna and Google were best friends now.

Boredom hit very quickly. It wasn't that she had a short attention span, Donna had always said, just that she liked a bit of variety in her life. With everything that modern living had to offer, there was no good reason for anyone to be bored or need to entertain themselves. It wasn't the eighteenth century anymore!

With boredom came restlessness so Donna stood, paced for a moment and then decided to take the Doctor at his word and go exploring. It was a slight disappointment to find the first door she came to locked, but it was just across the corridor from her own and Donna assumed from its proximity to the control room that it was probably the Doctor's. The next room down was unlocked and revealed a depressingly un-alien kitchen.

In fact, it could have been her mother's kitchen if the cupboards had been oak rather than metal and the counters faux marble rather than steel. Otherwise it was completely normal without even a hint of alien technology apart from the impression of roundels in the pristine white walls. There was even a microwave and, when Donna checked, the red tomatoey ring from a boiled-over bowl of baked beans.

She closed the door with a faint sense of disappointment at the ordinariness of the kitchen and tried the next door down. That, too, was unremarkable except that the bed covers were a lurid pink that hurt Donna's eyes. Whoever had owned the room must have left in a hurry because there was a pair of jeans tossed over a chair, socks hanging up to dry and the cupboards were filled with junk that must have been picked up during the girl's travels. It had to be a girl who had owned the room. Donna suspected that even alien men would object to a duvet in that shade of pink. Everything was covered in a layer of dust.

The next room held nothing except for ordinary, dull furniture and it looked like whoever had once lived here had planned and packed to leave. There was no dust and yet it still felt abandoned.

"How do you stand this?" Donna asked to the empty air.

No wonder the Doctor was lonely: living in a huge mausoleum to old friends and old lives would kill most people.

Every door along the corridor looked the same without even a hint as to what the rooms would contain from the outside. A huge bathroom and a cupboard of odd implements that might have been cleaning supplies looked the same as the bedrooms until the doors were opened. Nothing looked terribly alien and it dawned on Donna that most of the Doctor's companions were probably human. Certainly nothing yet looked like the haunt of some weird creature that breathed methane instead of oxygen.

One door revealed a bedroom that, on the surface, looked like a perfectly normal room and might have once housed a teenager. There was a picture on the stand by the bed of a girl with long hair next to a strange little man in a beige suit. They were standing under a red-handled umbrella even though there was bright sunshine in the background. A few socks and a pair of black leggings were all that remained of the clothes except for a dress that had to be from the 1940s at least, hanging at the back of the wardrobe as though the girl had tried to hide it. Donna almost left the room at that stage except something drew her to peak around a corner into an alcove that couldn't be seen from the doorway. A big table had been pushed into the alcove and it held what looked like a giant chemistry set, except it was far more complex than anything Donna had used at school. A few old deodorant cans sat on a corner of the table and the whole thing smelled faintly chemically, even though the room couldn't have been used for years.

Donna backed away carefully, half afraid that the chemical residues would do something weird or blow up before she'd even seen her first alien planet.

She abandoned the idea of exploring the TARDIS methodically and began picking doors at random. It was kind of fun never quite knowing what she would find and the rooms became less familiar the further into the vessel she went. One room was filled with clothing from floor to ceiling, every colour and fashion imaginable and some that she could not quite work out how anyone would wear. Donna made a mental note to ensure that the Doctor never took her anywhere that might require silver cat suits; on some people the material would enhance and shape their bums, on her the cat suit would just emphasise the bits she didn't want emphasising and flatten the bits she didn't want flattened.

Another room held two iron bedsteads covered with simple white bedclothes that had a hint of frill at the edges, yet there were tools on the delicate dresser that looked advanced and scary. A fairy princess mechanic was the only explanation that Donna could think of for the odd mixture.

She tried the next door along and found another room coated in thick, thick dust. This time the walls were covered with star charts and there were yellowing papers covered in mathematical notations that Donna would never understand if she lived to be a hundred.

The first truly alien room that she found appeared to be a medical bay. Gauze and bandages she recognised, the other equipment looked more advanced than anything she had ever seen before and none of it was at all familiar. It didn't even look like the stuff she had seen when she watched Star Trek with Granddad. There were at least fifty beds and it occurred to Donna for the first time that the sheer size of the TARDIS was enough to house hundreds of people, not the one person she had seen.

The dormitory-style room she found a few minutes later could easily have slept twenty and she wondered what the TARDIS' true purpose was. It couldn't have been made for one man, could it?

It would be far too easy to get lost in the identical white corridors of the TARDIS so Donna developed a plan of taking left-hand corridors whenever she wanted to branch away from the corridor she was exploring. That way she would just have to take a right at the T-junction every time on her way back and she would eventually find the control room again. It should have meant that she would eventually find the outer walls of the huge ship, or at least pass through the console room, but the corridors never seemed to end. There was always another left-turn if she wanted it and Donna told herself that the floors were sloping slightly upwards so that she was walking in a spiral over the consol room. Any other option just made her head hurt.

The further she went into the TARDIS, the more unoccupied rooms she found. There were a few rooms that had been used - one room with a typewriter and hundreds of pieces of screwed up paper looked almost hastily abandoned - but she was gradually moving into parts of the ship that didn't seem to have been entered for centuries. There was no dust, the TARDIS seemed to have systems to clean everything that were only broken in a couple of rooms, but there was an air of abandonment and cold emptiness. She felt as though these parts of the ship were waiting for something that would never come. There were large lounges that could have seated dozens of people and small studies for one, libraries that disappeared into the distance and single bedrooms covered in plastic drapes.

She explored for hours, feeling tired and dusty yet always curious to see what was through the next door and around the next corner. Eventually she opened a door and instead of dust or dry, stale air, Donna was greeted by warm summer air. It was a garden inside the ship, lush with vegetation and filled with the sounds of birds and insects.

Stepping inside, Donna felt peace surround her and she closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the air that was so full of life and growing things. Usually the outdoors and nature didn't interest her, but after the hours of dead, lifeless rooms this was heavenly. Donna explored the garden, many of the plants entirely unfamiliar but enchanting in their newness and beauty. She wondered how many of them were Earth species that she had never seen before and how many were alien. Perhaps some of them came from the Doctor's home planet. Perhaps it was too painful to see these remnants of his lost world and that was why the garden was so far from the console room. There were some benches dotted through the garden that were worn with use and tangles of ivy grew around stone columns. At some time, this garden had been visited regularly. It seemed like a good place to stop and think.

The warmth, the fresh air and the exertion of the last few hours began to catch up with Donna and she found herself nodding on a bench with no memory of sitting down.

"Right, time to find a bed," Donna said firmly, deciding that the worn wooden bench was no substitute for a soft mattress and warm blankets no matter how tempting it looked. "Up you get, Donna."

She only got as far as the dormitory she had seen a few doors ago and there she decided that she had done enough. It was hardly as though anyone else would want to use one of those beds, was it? The bed was a little firmer than she was used to and the covers felt a little silky even though they looked cotton-ish, but none of that mattered much. Donna kicked off her shoes, crawled into the bed and was asleep in moments.

***

It was impossible to say how she slept for, but Donna thought it was probably a long time and she felt surprisingly refreshed when she woke even though she had now been wearing the same clothes for well over twenty-four hours. A quick trip to one of the large bathrooms helped a lot and then Donna began retracing her steps back to the console room. Except it seemed like the TARDIS had moved around in some strange way overnight because she only turned right at two T-junctions before finding the console room doors ahead of her.

The Doctor was just emerging from the console room with a mug of tea in his hand and he brightened at the sight of her. "Donna! I wondered where you'd got to. We'll be landing in a few minutes."

"Don't land before I've had a shower," Donna said, wrinkling her nose. "This jacket is manky. Don't you ever dust in here?"

A slightly worried expression crossed the Doctor's face. "Ah, Donna, where have you been? Exactly?"

"I did what you told me to," Donna said, brushing fruitlessly at the dust coating her left sleeve. "I explored. Did you know that there's a garden in here?"

She had only know the Doctor for a few hours, really, but she was learning to read him already and what she read for a moment before he pulled on a blank expression was yearning and ancient pain.

"Yes, the Cloister Garden," the Doctor said quietly. "It's, well, it's-"

"Really lovely," Donna finished. "But seriously, don't you dust in here? And everything seems to move overnight."

"Of course it doesn't," the Doctor said very quickly. "Twenty minutes all right for you?"

As Donna showered and tried to decide what would be the right kind of clothes for her first adventure, she reflected that the Doctor was a very bad liar sometimes and the TARDIS was a very strange ship indeed.


End file.
